ISIS...Islamic State Victims

If you had the faintest idea of what you were talking about you would know full well that ISIS is not AQ and there is no love lost between either faction

And ISIS is operating within one small area. Global jihad? Are you kidding?

There have been far less AQ attacks on the west and saudi in last few years than there were in the preceding years to 9/11/ Which stuffs your so called point

I was all for the west going into Iraq. unlike some i do not have a creepy admiration for dictators who made the lives of millions a misery and enacted genocide at every opportunity. The obvious problem with iraq was the aftermath and pre invasion intelligence which was hopeless.
 
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Did you actually read what David Cameron wrote at the weekend Clive? Let's just say he's got a very different take from you. Indeed, it would appear that yesterday he pulled together the police chiefs and intelligence services and asked them if there were any new powers they needed. That's how unconcerned he is. He said there was a very real threat on our own streets, as we've already seen once. The idea that it's million of miles away is complacent, and would be a complete dereliction on your part were you ever in a position to make such decisions (thankfully you're not)

The idea that they're living in caves just proves how disconnected you are. I'm afraid you're still marrooned in the last decade. AQ moved out of Afghanistan years ago. They now have an independent state fallen under their name, and whole regions in other parts of the world (principally Africa). They have powerful friends in allied arab countries who raise millions for their networks unchecked

Indeed, even the ever loyal BBC pretty well let the cat out the bag when describing IS as originally being part of AQ in Iraq (a group that never existed until Saddam was toppled incidentally)

The only person (other than yourself) who tried to proclaim victory was George W Bush. He flew out to an aircraft carrier to do so, clearly you won't be able to do this as we don't have any aircraft capable of landing on our container ship that masquerades as one. Bush annoucned victory of course just as the Iraqi insurrection started

On the subject of patronising please allow me to continue to do so :D

It would be a little bit like a Chelsea fan congratulating themselves for seeing off the threats of Newton Heath and Ardwick FC
 
Mind you, I should confess that I'm still not entirely sure I know who IS is, or just how its come into being from its' current incarnation. It seems to have dragged in a few influences along the way from being a broadly Aleppo 'freedom fighters' movement. It does have the hallmarks of a black op gone wrong, and it only started to really gain traction after the events of last summer, and the failure of the peace conference in February time
 
One thing that continues to puzzle me, and it's being pedalled by the BBC again today, is this Hague/ Hillary/ Blair (and Clive) line that had we intervened against Assad a year ago when he's supposed to have used chemical weapons, IS wouldn't have happened. This is from the BBC's website today that's trying to analyse it

"Islamist extremists linked to an off-shoot of al-Qaeda had long been a source of concern in Western capitals.

Their ability to co-opt more moderate Islamists and to confront fighters backed by the West and its Gulf allies was one of the reasons cited for the reluctance to supply Western weaponry to opposition fighters.

Where might such weaponry end up?

But the removal of Syria's chemical weapons stockpile was in a sense a distraction.

It did little to alter the horror of the Syrian fighting. And President Obama's critics - some of whom argued for the use of air power not just in a punitive sense but to unseat the Syrian regime - believed that the White House had missed an opportunity to change the military balance in Syria once and for all.

In the absence of air strikes, they argue, it is the most extreme elements of the opposition - the jihadists - who have prospered. These groups have metamorphosed into the self-declared Islamic State that now controls a swathe of territory in both Syria and Iraq".


I've never understood this blind leap of faith in that all we had to do was identify some moderate group, arm them, egg them on, and that they'd win. Quite the opposite. They'd lose, as they did in Egypt, as they did in Somalia, as they did in Libya, as they did in Iraq. If you wanted to stop IS at source, the best way of doing so was to arm and support the group most opposed to them, who possessed the most men under arms, and arsenal capable of thwarting ISIS (something you should have done in Libya incidentally). In both cases the group concerned were the governments of Gaddaffi and Assad

The west really needs to take lessons in enemy identification
 
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This interpretation looks nearer to me Clive,as does the lineage that traces key personnel and their formative influences. Invoking a BBC article from February in the speed with which this is evolving is tanatmount to an archive, and even more laughable given that the BBC have changed their own view in the last month and are pedalling a totally different story today

http://qz.com/246923/why-isil-is-worse-than-al-qaeda-and-any-other-terrorist-group-that-came-before/

AQIM weren't always affiliated to AQ either. Then one day they were. The situation is fluid and reminds me of Trotskyits splinters
 
No-one is saying IS is the same thing as AQ, clivex.

IS has come about as a result of the Jihadist "awakening" spawned by the AQ philosophy of militant Salafism.....in much the same way as Boko Haram and Al Shabbab are.
 
Grasshopper said:
No-one is saying IS is the same thing as AQ, clivex.

IS has come about as a result of the Jihadist "awakening" spawned by the AQ philosophy of militant Salafism.....in much the same way as Boko Haram and Al Shabbab are.
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I shudder to think whats happened to those 200 poor schoolgirls
 
clivex said:
You mean SPLITTERS!
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No splinters, albeit splitters amounts to the same thing. I'm sure you'll remember remember from your young days on the left before you invented this ridiculious Clivex personna and present yourself as some kind of neo liberal, that the whole of the Trotty tendancy was fractured with 1001 splinter groups, perhaps best parodied in the Life of Brian (which was absolutely spot on)
 
Grasshopper said:
IS has come about as a result of the Jihadist "awakening" spawned by the AQ philosophy of militant Salafism.....in much the same way as Boko Haram and Al Shabbab are.
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The Jihadist awakening is not the most striking similarity between those three groups though.
 
Grasshopper said:
No-one is saying IS is the same thing as AQ, clivex.

IS has come about as a result of the Jihadist "awakening" spawned by the AQ philosophy of militant Salafism.....in much the same way as Boko Haram and Al Shabbab are.
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Grasshoppers right Clive

The thing is we're in the process of pulling out of Afghanistan so have to claim to have achieved something otherwise it looks like a pyrig victory at best, or even a defeat in some quarters. Well we can hardly claim to have instilled a fully functioning and peaceful democratic oasis, so we need to look to something else. The easiest claim to sustain is that we've degraded both AQ and the Taleban (I expect the latter to be running the country with 12-18 months with the ISI pulling the strings). The degrading of AQ in Afghanistan I believe has occurred, but as Grassy points out their legacy was almost cemented on 9/11 regardless

Try looking at it this way round.

Had there been no AQ there would never have been any invasion of Iraq

Had their been no invasion of Iraq, Saddam would have been left in control and crushed AQIM (as he was doing to militant islam before the west intervened on the side of the extremists) - same with Gadaffi, and Assad for that matter

Without any AQIM there would have been no ISIS or IS

There are a number of people in senior positions who have made some catastrophic strategic errors in this ever since 9/11, and it starts with George W Bush but works down the line

You actually had three natural allies in the region who all had armies capable of throwing back radical islam. So far you displaced two of them and replaced it with a cauldron of militancy, and were in the process of trying to replace the third on some flakey idea that he'd ordered the use of chemical weapons in his own capital city under the noses of a UN weapons inspection team in a war his was winning and had no reason to resort to such weapons

Do you think it possible now that this chemical weapons attack in Damascus that Hague was so convinced was Assad within 5 mins of it being reported might have been someone else now?
 
Grasshopper said:
IS has come about as a result of the Jihadist "awakening" spawned by the AQ philosophy of militant Salafism
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Jihadism "awoke" long before AQ ever appeared on the scene.
Jihad, long and bloody, was being waged in the Phillipines, Indonesia, Algeria, back in the 60's, 70's and 80's.

I have no doubt that an ISIS-type jihadi outfit would have arisen even without an Al Qaeda existence. History over the past hundred years is littered with dozens of jihadist groupings. They take their inspiration from intolerance, hatred, and a medieval view of the world. They don't need an Al Qaeda for guidance.
What differentiates ISIS, maybe, is the speed and intensity of their advance. It's like a blitzkrieg that we haven't seen before. Maybe this is down to their IT savvy-ness or determination. Or sheer luck. I dunno.
 
Overlap their progress against the failure of western intervention and another possible explanation occurs. It's not as if the west doesn't have form in creating and supporting a group, only for it to spin out of control. It's certainly happened before, and there is a bit of me wondering if this might be the deeper interpretation of Hillary Clinton's comments

The other ingredient of course is that the Iraqi army ran away, despite outnumbering ISIS 10 to 1 and occupying the defensive positions and having the superior equipment? Why? One suspects that disenfranchised Saddamists are now the driving force behind the IS. I can't really think of any good reason why they'd run with so much in their favour?

They were scared, but what a slap in the face for all this training we've supposed to have spent a decade putting them through. An army fell within 48 hours at the hands of 5000 people driving round on Subarus. The speed with which they seem to have learnt how to operate the heavy equipment they've inheritted also points to external or former training. I suspect IS is now a cocktail of all sorts of influences, but the one thing they will rally to increasingly is militancy as that, for whatever reason, has often been the haven that the desperate gravitate to when a vacuum is opened (as it has been in Europe in the past)
 
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Warbler said:
Overlap their progress against the failure of western intervention and another possible explanation occurs. It's not as if the west doesn't have form in creating and supporting a group, only for it to spin out of control. It's certainly happened before, and there is a bit of me wondering if this might be the deeper interpretation of Hillary Clinton's comments

The other ingredient of course is that the Iraqi army ran away, despite outnumbering ISIS 10 to 1 and occupying the defensive positions and having the superior equipment? Why? One suspects that disenfranchised Saddamists are now the driving force behind the IS. I can't really think of any good reason why they'd run with so much in their favour?

They were scared, but what a slap in the face for all this training we've supposed to have spent a decade putting them through. An army fell within 48 hours at the hands of 5000 people driving round on Subarus. The speed with which they seem to have learnt how to operate the heavy equipment they've inheritted also points to external or former training. I suspect IS is now a cocktail of all sorts of influences, but the one thing they will rally to increasingly is militancy as that, for whatever reason, has often been the haven that the desperate gravitate to when a vacuum is opened (as it has been in Europe in the past)
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Wouldn't disagree with that
 
clivex said:
I was just about to bring up Algeria
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I tend to think Algeria had stronger nationalist elements in it and probably drew more from the pan arab nationalism of Nasser than it did any clear Jihadist DNA. Sure they resorted to the same sorts of tactics, they weren't likely to take the French on in a fully fledged military field engagement. The slogans I remember seeing daubed on the walls of Algiers were more nationalist than jihadist

The first revolution of modern times that had a religious core was the 79 uprising in Iran (which started life as a pro democracy camapign of the middle classes before the radicals took it over) another bit of placement gone wrong incidentally
 
Warbler said:
I tend to think Algeria had stronger nationalist elements in it and probably drew more from the pan arab nationalism of Nasser than it did any clear Jihadist DNA. Sure they resorted to the same sorts of tactics, they weren't likely to take the French on in a fully fledged military field engagement. The slogans I remember seeing daubed on the walls of Algiers were more nationalist than jihadist
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What are you on ?
I'm not talking about the Algerian War of Independence against the French in the '50's; I'm referring to the war waged by the Islamic Salvation Army against Algerian government forces in the early 90's. This was a jihadist movement driven by islamist fundamentalism and radicalism.
And like the current ISIS modus, it too was marked by wholesale massacres of civilians in villages and implementation of sharia. Estimates put the casualty toll at around 100,000 including the "execution" of over 50 journalists.
 
Well make your bloody mind up what you're talking about because your post clearly mentions three decades none of which were the 1990's

"Jihad, long and bloody, was being waged in the Phillipines, Indonesia, Algeria, back in the 60's, 70's and 80's."
 
Warbler said:
Well make your bloody mind up what you're talking about because your post clearly mentions three decades none of which were the 1990's

"Jihad, long and bloody, was being waged in the Phillipines, Indonesia, Algeria, back in the 60's, 70's and 80's."
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Neither were the 50's mentioned either, the middle of which saw the Algerian/French war of independence. Thinking, you must be pushing on a bit now to have seen nationalist slogans pasted on the walls of Algiers back then.
The Algerian jihadist war began in 1990 if memory serves, which is as near as damned to the 80's in any religion. I'm kinda hoping I might be excused for being out a year by most reasonable people, no?

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The Algerian civil war was much more of a 1990's thing

It does however serve as an example of mixing democracy in countries that simply aren't ready for it. To my mind it conforms perfectly with the model that says there are only two pillars in these states capable of filling the vacuum that develops when democracy is introduced

1: Organised religion
2: The Military

In that regard it's much nearer to what played out in Egypt a couple of years ago, with army eventually interveneing on an election result that didn't like the look of

An educated middle class usually egged on by university academics at home and abroad, begin a liberal pro-democratic movement (Iran 77-78) and Pakistan come to think of it. This movement gains traction but is swamped by the numerically greater and more vicious street fighters from the working class districts who take it over. They convert it into a radicalised islamist movement (Iran 79)

Sometimes the west doesn't react quickly enough and still believes that the movement is as described by its founders and starts to back them (Libya 2011) usually egged on by academics at London universities giving civil service handlers misleading diagnostics. In cases like this they make disasterous choices and back the Islamists (Libya, Egypt, and Syria) and just about everywhere across the arab spring.
 
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